Battlefield medicine has advanced significantly since the days when surgeons used whiskey as an anesthetic, and in the last year several new technologies have rolled out to deployed soldiers facing physical or psychological disorders. The U.S. Army program responsible for fielding software and the hardware on which it resides is pushing the cutting edge of diagnostics and treatment to the tip of the spear. Personnel hope the effort will save lives and limbs not only by treating injury or illness, but also by keeping troops off the road in war zones.

I don’t think anyone would argue with my notion that we live in a dangerous world and that, no matter where you live, there are significant threats to national and regional security.

In the next two years, federal officials plan to unveil a new means for providing emergency information to the U.S. public.

The Department of Homeland Security is adapting intelligence community tools to facilitate information sharing among its diverse elements. These include social media-based successes as well as information fusion centers across the nation.

The adoption of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) has opened up new opportunities for reducing information technology costs. Now, the U.S. Defense Department must enter this option into its planning.

The path to achieving the vital goal of coalition interoperability may require abandoning longtime networking tenets in favor of a data-centric or knowledge management approach.

It is no secret that the Pentagon process for acquiring technology can be a long, cumbersome slog. But sometimes warfighters need something, and they need it now to save lives or gain an advantage over the enemy. In those cases--hundreds of cases--the rapid acquisition process can deliver capabilities weeks, months or even years quicker than the traditional routine.

A little-known U.S. Army site at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, is developing software to resolve data sharing issues between the three New Jersey nuclear power facilities and the state’s data fusion center in West Trenton—information sharing that would be critical in case of a nuclear disaster. The nuclear power plants and the state’s data fusion hub use two different decision support systems that are incapable of sharing data.

The U.S. Navy and the medical community share seemingly different but surprisingly similar problems—finding undersea mines and identifying certain cells, such as cancer cells. And they have discovered that software designed by the Navy to locate undersea mines also contributes to faster, more accurate diagnoses of diseases and can foster medical breakthroughs.

The third and final day of West 2012 in San Diego combined the thrusts of the first two days: an overview of the future military force and a breakdown of specific issues and challenges. The overview came just before the release of U.S. defense budget figures, and their relationship to the recently announced strategy was the focal point of the day’s first presentation.